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Matt Andersen

Volume 15 | Number 1 | September 2013

By Steve Kiggins

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Matt Andersen has a simple reason as to why you should care
about his research.

“I like to eat three times a day,” he says. “Do you?”

With the world’s population growing by an average of 1.10
percent annually and projected to reach some 10 billion people by 2050, the
University of Wyoming economist has joined a global effort to spur additional spending
on agricultural research and development in an effort to ensure that there’s food
for every mouth.

Though not as bleak as countries like Cameroon and Zimbabwe,
where food insecurity threatens everyday life, the United States has its own
challenges.

While the country’s population has soared to about 316
million, up from 226 million in 1980, the growth of public spending on
agricultural research in recent decades has slowed, resulting in what Andersen
calls “troubling reductions” in productivity.

“The most important and impactful part of my research is to
provide concrete information to policymakers about the importance of making these
absolutely critical financial investments in agricultural research,” says Andersen,
an associate professor in the UW Department of Agricultural and Applied
Economics since 2007.

He will further his research this fall as a visiting fellow
at the University of Leuven in Belgium, where he will work with internationally
renowned information scientist Wolfgang Glanzel. “If we are going to feed the
expanding global population in the next 100 years, we need to keep spending
money on agricultural research. We need to spend more money on agricultural
research.”

Andersen’s research has garnered national and international
attention, too. He co-wrote a 2010 book, Persistence Pays: U.S. Agricultural Productivity
and the Benefits from Public R&D Spending that won three major
awards—including the Quality of Research Discovery Award from the Agricultural
and Applied Economics Association, the largest and most prestigious
organization in agricultural and natural resource economics.

In the book, Andersen and his co-authors found new evidence
linking state-specific agricultural productivity measures to federal and state government
investments in agricultural research and extension.

Their findings were supported by a December 2012 report by
the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, which recommended
the U.S. boost its annual spending on agricultural research by a whopping $700
million.

This is all particularly heady work for Andersen, who grew
up in the Chicago suburbs and worked as a ski patroller in Colorado for six
years before deciding to pursue his master’s degree. And, even then, Andersen planned
to become an attorney. He later changed his mind and studied mineral economics
at the Colorado School of Mines (‘00), then shifted to agricultural and
resource economics while earning his Ph.D. at the University of California,
Davis (‘05).

Now, Andersen’s work could prove pivotal in America’s efforts
to meet the increasing demands of its population.

But his job, he says, pales in comparison to that of the
farmers and ranchers who work the land to provide food for all of us.